Serbia was among the first to regulate the bitcoin trade, Finance Minister Sinisa Mali points out.
He says that the Law on Digital Property was adopted in order for Serbia to keep pace with innovations and changes in the digital world.
“We wanted to be a part of the growing segment of the digital economy,” the Minister of Finance stated in the author’s text for Kurir.
In that way, he says, first of all, young people are given the opportunity to use new sources of financing, which are now legally regulated.
“And we keep them in Serbia, where they can realize their business, innovative ideas, because Serbia does not lag behind the world in the development of IT technology and using the advantages of the digital world.”
He says that the Law on Digital Property envisages the existence of organizations that deal with bitcoin trade and where they will be able to exchange bitcoin for dinars completely legally, just as money is exchanged in an exchange office.
“Simply put, you have bitcoins and you want to sell them. Some accept it, some don’t,” he said.
By the way, Mali states that Serbia is among the first countries in the world to regulate this area, by adopting adequate legal solutions. In this way, legal certainty is introduced in this area.
The issue of users of digital assets has been regulated, as well as the issue of cryptocurrency trading.
“Bitcoin – the most popular and most famous cryptocurrency, for many is just a word that we can hear very often in previous days and months, and which, on the other hand, is much less understood. Bearing in mind the fact that Serbia adopted the Law on Digital Property in late 2020 by which this type of property is regulated, it is necessary to work on spreading awareness about this type of property, and it is natural to start from its most famous representative, bitcoin,” states Mali.
As he says, at the very beginning, it is necessary to separate the technology on which bitcoin is based – blockchain and the nature of the use of that technology in the form of digital currency.
Blockchain, a compound word for block and chain, is a database that is not located in one centralized location, but exists as a group of smaller databases.
They represent blocks that are interconnected by digital technology, so that each change in the database is saved in several individual databases.
In other words, the database is decentralized.
In the case of bitcoin, this decentralized database contains information on all transactions, that is, bitcoin exchanges as a unit of measurement of this virtual currency.
“For the purposes of our law, a virtual currency is a type of digital property that has not been issued and whose value is not guaranteed by the central bank or other public authority, which is not necessarily tied to a legal tender and has no legal status of money or currency. Legal entities accept it as a means of exchange and it can be bought, sold, exchanged, transferred and stored electronically,” explains the Minister.
When it comes to the value of bitcoin, the minister states, it is completely determined by the market, that is, people and companies that use it as a means of exchange.
He points out that the dizzying growth in the value of the bitcoin price, which at one point exceeded 40,000 US dollars, is especially interesting, which led to record interest in this, as well as other digital currencies.
The lack of a central system means that the value of bitcoin is very unstable and prone to sharp rise and fall, in line with perception public and users, without mechanisms of its control, he states.
He adds that one bitcoin is actually a file with data stored in the owner’s digital wallet located on his computer or smartphone.
As this database is public, in theory it is possible to find every transaction that has ever taken place, which significantly increases the transparency of the system, reduces the possibility of someone using or creating bitcoin that does not exist, B92 reports.
